In 1942, during Operation Barbarossa, Nazi German soldiers arrested Rozumnyi, then aged 16, and sent him to work as a forced labourer in the city of Eisleben.
He soon built up a friendship and working relationship with Sverstiuk, helping to organise a Shevchenko Days celebration and mobilise student bodies in Ternopil Oblast for Ukrainian causes.
[4] While teaching in Solone, Rozumnyi refused to give lectures in support of state atheism, socialism, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
He distributed samvydav publications to his fellow teachers and students, including the works of Pavlo Tychyna, Volodymyr Sosiura, Yevhen Malaniuk [uk], Vasyl Symonenko and Ivan Dziuba.
[5] He continued to be monitored by the KGB, which repeatedly conducted searches of his home, interrogated him and demanded that he sign waivers denouncing "anti-Soviet activity".
[4] He was later fired from his job (officially as part of downsizing, although it came after he wrote a letter to the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper condemning Soviet anti-alcohol campaigns) and became director of the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Philharmonic Hall.
[4] According to dissident Petro Grigorenko in November 1981, his arrest came as part of a broader crackdown on Ukrainian human rights activists following the 1979 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe meeting in Belgrade.
Rozumnyi was ultimately sentenced to three years' imprisonment,[4] which he served out in Zhovti Vody and Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and Bikin, in Russia's far-eastern Khabarovsk Krai.